Tomo Fujita Guitar Wisdom

I'm looking at starting to use triads musically, but don't understand why different inversions sound better than the root notes that you would use in a melody?

I had a go a Twinkle twinkle prior to the lesson, the notes being E B C# B, A Ab F# E. If you simply use those as your root notes for triads it always sounds "off" even if you start getting creative and mixing up the inversions
e.g. (Strings 123) E-1st-inv. B-1st-inv. C#-2nd-inv. B-Root.

In the lesson Tomo goes E-1st-inv. B-1st-inv. A-2nd-inv. E-Root. which sounds much better but doesn't follow the 1 5 6 5 root note melody rather a 1 5 4 1 root note melody, I don't really understand why this works though as I would expect using different root notes to create a different melody, is it more important that you follow the melody on the highest pitch string and play any triad which happens to have that note in it? If so why does only using 1st inversion for E B C# B still sound "off"?

The shortest answer I can think of is that the C# triad isn't diatonic to the key of the song, E major.

A first inversion C# triad is F G# C#. There is a lot of tension between E, the key of the song, and F, a semi-tone away, giving it that "off" sound. If you tried a C# minor first inversion triad, it sounds better because C# minor fits in the key of E; it just sounds different, not really "off", but unfamiliar, because that is not the way it was originally written and the sound isn't what we expected.

Here is Tomo's comment:

"Thanks for subscribing to my Guitar Wisdom. In this lesson, I used the E Major scale and played the melody over three chords: E A B = I IV V.. Just follow the melody and choose the best-sounding I IV and V chords."